The Brown University “Garibaldi on the Surface” project is featured in the British Library’s exhibition, Growing Knowledge – the Evolution of Research (12 October 2010 – 16 July 2011), which showcases some of the latest research tools, content and spaces that will transform research in the 21st century.

For more information about the exhibit see: http://www.bl.uk/news/2010/pressrelease20100708.html.

A centerpiece of the British Library exhibition, “Garibaldi on the Surface” is a collaborative project between Brown’s Computer Science Department, the Brown University Library and Italian Studies Professor Massimo Riva, with sponsorship from Microsoft Research. This pilot project Accessing the Garibaldi panorama through a Microsoft Surface, users can explore and examine the Library’s double-sided 270 foot linear painting depicting the life and times of the Italian liberator, along with a wide array of pre-selected historically and culturally relevant digital documents from the Garibaldi / Risorgimento digital archive (http://dl.lib.brown.edu/garibaldi/). Researchers can zoom in and out on specific scenes, listen to a voice-over narration in both Italian and English, access embedded documents, and read explanatory notes about characters and events depicted in the panorama.

This project is one of several collaborative investigations by the Computer Science-Library-Italian Studies team at Brown that examine how tactile computing can facilitate discovery and exploration of archival materials and provide a better understanding of the research process.